in mourning
it's the end of an era
it finally happened. after 16 long years on twitter, my private account that i have had since i was 12 years old was banned. apparently retweeting content that is pro-palestine, pro-egypt, and anti-argentina will get you flagged as a bot. even after going through the appeals process and proving to elon and the powers that be that i am in fact not a robot, they ultimately decided to permanently ban my account.
i am not writing this to make myself out to be some kind of political martyr. i think everything going on in palestine, and the racism and retaliation that the egyptian national team faced for being outspoken about the genocide in palestine during the world cup is so much more important than my private account on a dying social media app being censored. but for some reason, i am having a hard time reconciling that in the span of just 36 hours i lost 16 years of my life.
in 2010, i got my first laptop and almost immediately made a twitter account. i grew up in an extremely rural part of pennsylvania in an isolating and abusive household — the kind where i was tormented by a man in his late 40s, locked in a basement, and not allowed to have friends outside of church. twitter was one of the only places where i could connect with the outside world and experience a life i was being deprived of.
on twitter i could be anyone i wanted to be. i could have interests, hobbies, and friends outside of what my mom and her husband had deemed appropriate. twitter is where i was introduced to some of my biggest influences that i still reference to this day: the original indie sleaze movement, david lynch, lana del rey.
without the access to the outside world that twitter provided to me, one of two things could’ve very easily happened. i could’ve successfully killed myself by age 13, or i could’ve wound up submitting to the abuse i had been experiencing for 6 years at that point and become the evangelical angel daughter my mom and her husband had always wanted me to be. thankfully neither of those things happened, and instead i became an adult with fully formed opinions and great taste.
the ungovernable era of the internet and social media did have its drawbacks. i had guys on omegle trying to get me to masturbate on camera for them when i was barely 14 years old. i was sending provocative photos of myself to men on twitter for attention. there is something so humbling about trying to take nude photos on a low-res laptop webcam when your boobs have barely started to come in, but sometimes a webcam can be a window into the soul. i ultimately ended up learning so much about myself and how much others’ perception of me can influence how i move through life.
it feels weird to mourn the loss of a social media account, but there are 16 years of my life and infinite versions of myself frozen in time and lost forever. i will not even be entertaining the idea of joining another twitter-like app, so do not try to convince me to pivot to threads or bluesky. i’m still longing for an era of twitter, the internet, and me that i will never get back.